Edward Said died ten years ago – in September 2003, after a twelve-year battle with leukemia. One of the 20th century’s great intellectuals, Said, author of the masterworks Orientalism and Culture and Imperialism, was also a beloved professor to generations of students at Columbia University, a gifted amateur pianist and an opera critic for The Nation magazine.

He was perhaps best known for his fierce defense of the rights of his people, the Palestinians, in numerous books and hundreds of essays and articles published worldwide.

September also marks another fateful 20th anniversary – that of the now-infamous Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn, which sealed the Oslo accords. The legacies of Oslo and its greatest critic, Edward Said, stand as polar opposites. Indeed, it was Said who was among the first to sharply criticise the accords, in part because, unlike many satisfied pundits of the day, he had actually read them. For this reason, his widow Mariam told me, he had declined a White House invitation to attend the ceremony in September 1993. Today, his words on Oslo are the soundings of a prophet.

A Kingdom of Illusions

“What Israel has gotten is official Palestinian consent to continue occupation,” Said wrote in “The Middle East ‘Peace Process’,” an essay in Peace and its Discontents. “[A] kingdom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command.” He wrote these words in response to “Oslo II”, of 1995, when Israel’s full military control of the West Bank shrank slightly, from 72 to 60 percent – the same as today, 18 years later.

Indeed his earlier concerns, written four days before the White House ceremony he had declined to attend, were born out. “The ‘historical breakthrough’ … leaves Palestinians very much the subordinates, with Israel still in charge of settlements, East Jerusalem, and the economy,” Said wrote in the Guardian and Cairo’s Al Ahram Weekly. “Israel will control the land, water, overall security, and foreign affairs. … For the undefined future, Israel will dominate the West Bank, including … almost all the water and land, a good percentage of which it has already taken. The question is, how much land is Israel going to in fact cede for peace?”

You are forgiven if it seems these words were written last week. In the two decades since Said wrote them, a succession of would-be peacemakers have recycled their failures as a diplomatic “Groundhog Day”: Same old ideas, same failed “process”.

Yet Said, despite the frequent vitriol of his critics (Commentary dubbed him “Professor of Terror”), was not an opponent of peace per se. He was, rather, an advocate of a just peace.

In 1998, nearly five years into the Oslo process, Said began investigating alternatives to the peaceful and just coexistence he deeply believed in for all of the people between the river and the sea – the Jordan and the Mediterranean. This conviction led him into a friendship with the Argentine-Israeli conductor and pianist, Daniel Barenboim, which resulted in their founding the West Eastern Divan Orchestra. Today, ten years after the death of Said, the Divan remains popular with audiences in the US and Europe. But with the spirit of rapprochement long faded from the Holy Land, the orchestra has fallen out of favour with many Palestinians. Indeed, some of the orchestra’s Arab musicians have left out of frustration that the Divan is unwilling to make a unified public statement against the occupation of Palestine.

What follows is an excerpt from my forthcoming book, tentatively titled Children of the Stones. The excerpt focuses on Said’s determination to find what he called “an alternative way of making peace”. The account is based on multiple interviews, video footage, secondary and first-hand accounts, including Tania Nasir’s remembrance in Al Ahram Weekly.

Children of the Stones

Edward’s scepticism of the peace accords deepened in the Spring of 1998, when he travelled across Israel and Palestine for an autobiographical film produced by the BBC to mark the 50th anniversary of the creation of Israel and the Palestinian “Nakba” (Catastrophe) of 1948. One day he went to a rubble-strewn field where, hours earlier, a Palestinian home had been demolished by Israeli bulldozers. “Every day, every hour, every minute for 50 years, and it’s continuing,” a visibly anguished Edward told the film crew. Behind him, an old man in a checkered keffiyeh knelt beside the fallen stones outside his former home, praying to Mecca. “Look, the little bits of plastic, the little logs, the bit of railing here, a tin can crushed here,” Edward said. “These are the atoms out of which the tragedy of Palestine is constructed.” Edward paused repeatedly, short of breath, holding back tears. “It’s very very hard for me to stand here talking about it … when I see my own people going through this … without any relief, without any sympathy or support from the so-called civilised world. And we hear about the peace process, but who is protecting, who is giving these people peace?”

Edward had been battling leukemia for nearly seven years, and probing urgently for an “alternative way of making peace.” Encounters like this drove him deeper into the search for new ideas. He remained convinced that one day, Palestinian independence was inevitable – just not through Oslo. “Palestine and Palestinians remain, despite Israel’s concerted efforts,” he wrote. “As an idea, a memory, and as an often buried or invisible reality, Palestine and its people have simply not disappeared.” As he travelled the Holy Land that spring, Edward encountered artists, politicians and intellectuals on both sides who shared his views, and who were willing to try new things to put them into action. This alternative thinking, he believed, should focus not on the details of a flawed agreement, but on bringing together the two peoples on equal footing.

In his search for alternatives based on equality, Edward had found a kindred spirit in Daniel Barenboim, the Israeli musician who had become his best friend, and with whom he traveled that spring. “We must do something for our people,” Daniel would tell Edward again and again.

Edward was in East Jerusalem, at the American Colony hotel, excited to share his ideas, and his friendship with Daniel, with his friends in Palestine. He picked up the phone and got an outside line. “Tania”, he said when he heard the voice on the other end. “Keefek? Keefcom? How are you and Hanna?”

Tania and Hanna Nasir were old friends of Edward and his wife, Mariam. Edward and Hanna went back to the days of Palestinian West Jerusalem in the 1940s, before the war of 1948 resulted in the flight and expulsion of Palestinians from the western portion of the city. Later, the two couples knew each other in the Palestinian diaspora, most recently in Jordan, where Hanna, the president of Birzeit University in the West Bank, lived in exile for 19 years after his expulsion by Israel. He’d been charged with “security violations” following protests at the university against Israeli rule. In the early days of Oslo, as a high-profile gesture of reconciliation, Israel had allowed Hanna to return. When he crossed over the River Jordan and onto home soil for the first time in nearly two decades, Edward and Mariam had been watching the historic event on television. That evening, from New York, they called their old friends in celebration.

Now Tania and Hanna were back together in the home they had shared with their children before his exile. It was the same house in which Hanna’s Christian family had established the Birzeit Higher School in the 1920s. That school would evolve into Birzeit University, eventually under Hanna’s leadership. Hanna’s sister, Rima Tarazi, was a co-founder, and his nephew, Suhail Khoury, the new director of the Palestine National Conservatory of Music (the Mahad), which was established under the auspices of the university. Tania, trained as a soprano, collaborated frequently with Rima, a pianist, on Palestinian songs of liberation, set in a classical vein.

Now Edward had a proposal for Tania, with whom he shared a deep love of classical music.

“Tania,” Edward said from his room at the American Colony, his voice energised and urgent. “I am here with my close friend Daniel Barenboim. He is a wonderful man, a great human being.” Tania knew of Daniel’s reputation as an advocate for the Palestinian cause. As a musician, she had long been familiar with Barenboim, and she knew the two men had become close friends. “It was part of the general atmosphere of people seeking rapprochement,” she recalled. Edward had taken a stand against the Oslo accords, but nevertheless, a sense of possibility was in the air. “It was all part of our inner dialogue: to where will this lead us?”

Now, Edward was suggesting, it could lead Tania to a concert hall in West Jerusalem.

“Daniel is giving a concert this weekend in West Jerusalem,” Edward told her. “You’re invited, Tania. We want you to come.”

Tania paused, unsure of how to respond. Under different circumstances, she would have said yes immediately. She wanted to preserve the remnants of positive feeling she and Hanna had felt since their return from exile, despite the growing violence and expanding settlements – including one on the hill just outside her living room window. But attending a concert in West Jerusalem would be a huge leap. She’d been born there nearly 57 years earlier, in 1941, but hadn’t been back in decades. She was not allowed, in fact, to go, by the authorities. Even if she obtained a permit, crossing from occupied territory to the land of her long-time enemy might be more than she could handle.

Tania believed as a musician that the arts could be a vehicle for understanding. But with the facts on the ground being what they were, she did not feel comfortable traveling to West Jerusalem, now part of another country, when that country still held her people under occupation. The situation was not normal and she did not want to suggest by going to Israel that it was. Still: Why should she decline to attend a piano recital in West Jerusalem by one of the world’s great musicians – and a defender of her people’s rights – on the invitation of her dear friend, Edward Said? What purpose would that serve?

Tania promised Edward she would think about it. She trusted and believed in Edward, and admired that he was trying to open new possibilities. “Edward was hungry,” she recalled. “He wanted to know what could change. There was this feeling that we could push for something. His friendship with Daniel was part of this.” Tania felt she owed it to Edward, and to Daniel for his invitation, and to herself, to find out what this was all about.

Soon she called Edward back, and found herself not only accepting the invitation to the concert, but inviting Edward and Daniel to dinner at the family home in Birzeit.

***

The guests arrived in the early evening, walking into a family room of 12-foot cross-vault ceilings and foot-thick plaster walls draped with Palestinian embroidery, and framing an upright piano, above which hung Nasir family photos dating back to the 1930s. Persian carpets covered the red-tiled floors.

Daniel, Edward and their hosts settled into couches, sipping arak and snacking from plates of grape leaves and candied almonds. Daniel asked about Hanna’s experience of deportation and exile. In November 1974, the university president explained, following the demonstrations of his students, he was arrested, handcuffed, blindfolded, place in a van with other deportees, and “driven for seven hours towards an unknown destiny”. Soldiers removed the blindfold and told Hanna he was in Lebanon.

“And then you moved to Jordan?” Daniel asked.

Yes, Hanna replied. In exile.

Tania noticed the concern on Daniels’ face. She was struck by his respectful, probing questions. She told him about the years of shuttling their children back and forth between Birzeit, where their family was determined to remain present, and Amman, where their father now lived. They needed travel permits, which required multiple stamps of approval from various occupation authorities. “From the municipality, the police station, the ministry of education, the tax centre, whatever,” Tania said. “I would sometimes have to do this over several days, because you’d have such long lines, and all this waiting. And all of a sudden there would be a soldier there, and someone would be out of line, or if whimsically he would just decide that we had misbehaved, he would start scolding us like children, and kick us all out. I would have been waiting for three or four hours, from the morning. ‘We’re finished now. Come tomorrow.’ That’s when you really feel occupied. And there was a fear inside you, that he would never stamp your permit, so you would shut up. And I would burn inside, because I had to get to Amman, to my husband, to the children, who had to go back to school.”

At the Allenby Bridge at the River Jordan, the dividing line between the West Bank and the kingdom of Jordan, “we would wait for eight hours, the children would have no food, no water, no diapers, no changing. I would be terrified if they would find a piece of paper in the children’s clothes, like a chocolate wrapper or something. And then they would send you all the way back to the end of the line. They knew it was chocolate, but it was an excuse: ‘You never know what’s on that piece of paper.’”

When Oslo arrived, Hanna said, as a kind of confidence-building measure in the peace process, Israel allowed him to come home. Tania went to Amman to accompany him, and Hanna made a point of saying that he would never cry and kiss the ground upon seeing Palestine again, like so many of the more sentimental refugees had done. The moment they crossed the Jordan and reached Palestinian soil, however, Hanna leapt from the bus in tears, kneeling down and kissing the ground. “Right on the bridge!” Tania laughed. “He was the first to go down from the bus!”

In nearby Jericho, throngs of jubilant Birzeit students cheered their president’s triumphant return. She and Hanna returned, Tania said, in a “genuine spirit of hope and reconciliation. We shared a sense of cautious joy.”

Five years later, the hope was dimming, Tania said, amidst an “avalanche of militancy and violence,” and the ever-expanding settlements. She pointed through the living room’s twin arched windows. Daniel looked to the southeast, beyond the darkened palm and cypress trees, to the bright yellow lights of a hilltop settlement a mile away.

Throughout the cocktail hour, and over a dinner of stuffed chicken and red wine, Tania sensed Edward’s pleasure at being with friends from both sides of the divide. He was listening intently; he knew all these stories, but his friend Daniel did not. “This was the first time I was confronted with people who had lived such a destiny,” he said years later. “I was very, very moved by that.”

Politics dominated the evening, but music was never far away. Hanna’s sister Rima, was a co-founder of the Palestine National Conservatory of Music. In the future, Daniel would play concerts there. Now, Edward and Daniel were in the nascent stages of a grand project – something that would focus on musicians from both sides, in a way that could promote a just peace and show what was possible. This was the idea.

The project still hadn’t taken shape. But soon Daniel would be considering an invitation by the city of Weimar, Germany, to play as part of the 250th birthday celebration of Goethe, a son of Weimar. Goethe sparked Edward’s sense of the possible. Unlike the “Orientalists” he regularly skewered as representatives of Western imperial and military domination, Edward saw Goethe as the epitome of a Westerner reaching out to understand the “other”. Goethe began his inquiry into Islam and the Arab world after receiving a torn page of the Quran from a returning German soldier in the early 19th century.

Such an inquiry, Edward believed, represented what could be possible, two centuries later, as a kind of parallel alternative to what he saw as a collapsing peace process. No place would be more appropriate for this than Weimar, where the currents of high culture and terrible history swirled together. It had been home to Bach, Liszt, Wagner, Nietzsche, and the death camp at Buchenwald. The Weimar invitation excited the imagination of the two friends, and soon they would begin thinking about bringing together young musicians from across the Middle East.

It was close to midnight by the time Edward and Daniel rose to leave and summoned their driver for the ride back to Jerusalem. Again, Daniel extended his invitation to Tania to attend the concert the next night in West Jerusalem. Tania assured him she would be there. There was risk involved, everyone knew – if caught trying to enter Israel without a permit, Tania could be arrested.

Late the next afternoon Edward sent a taxi eight miles north from Jerusalem to Birzeit. Tania climbed into the back alone, heading for the first time in decades to the city of her birth. Hanna had also lived in Jerusalem as a child, and as she rode, Tania recalled his old haunts: the Cinema Rex, the coffee shops, the YMCA, where he played tennis and studied Arabic typing, where his family attended concerts by the Palestine Symphony, and where the Palestinian musician Salvador Arnita gave his organ recitals. Now, without a permit, Tania would recall, “I had to come to Jerusalem in secrecy. I had to infiltrate it like an outlaw.”

Alone at the piano, Daniel played the first notes of Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony in B minor, the Pathetique. Tania began to weep. She longed to disappear into the music, and for moments, she would, only to be gripped by doubts over whether she should have agreed to come.

An hour later, after Daniel had played the last notes of Liszt’s Sonata in B Minor, the audience rose in a standing ovation. Tania and Edward rose, too. Daniel walked forward, closer to the audience, spoke briefly in Hebrew, then switched to English.

“Last night I was in the West Bank, at the home of a Palestinian academic, who has recently returned from an unjust 20-year deportation by the Israeli government,” Daniel said. “He and his family received me not just as a friend, but more as a member of the family.”

Tania was astounded. She and Edward looked at each other. What was Daniel trying to say? It was silent in the auditorium. Daniel stood in the small pool of light, speaking into the darkened hall. He spoke of peace and justice, and of the need to end the suffering on both sides. Suddenly Tania heard him say: “I am happy to have my Palestinian hostess of last night with us here this evening. She has accepted my invitation to come to Jerusalem, despite prohibitions and many reservations. To thank her, I would like to dedicate my encore to her.”

Edward was embracing Tania. “Only Daniel can do it,” he said. “Only he has the guts.” Tania was overcome with emotion, which only grew deeper as Daniel sat down at the piano to play a Chopin nocturne. As a child, Tania had danced to the nocturnes.

Sandy Tolan is associate professor at the Annenberg School for Communicaton and Journalism at USC, and author of The Lemon Tree: An Arab, a Jew, and the Heart of the Middle East. His book about playing music under occupation in Palestine will be published in 2014. He blogs at Ramallahcafe.com. Follow him on Twitter: @ramallahcafe. (This article was first published in Al Jazeera)

Sheikh Hussein Abu Kuwaik, a leader in Hamas movement, said on the twentieth anniversary of Oslo agreement that the signing of the agreement was a second Nakba (catastrophe) to the Palestinian cause. Oslo accord has created a state of division within the Palestinian people, compromised the Palestinian rights and deepened the suffering of the Palestinian people where it gave legitimacy to the occupation's confiscation of 78% of Palestinian historical land, he said. He told the PIC in an interview on Tuesday that Oslo Accord constituted a serious turning point in the history of the Palestine cause and was meant among other goals to liquidate the armed resistance. He added that the Oslo agreement divided the Palestinian people into two parties, one party who supports negotiations and works in coordination with the occupation, while the second party still adheres to resistance option. Describing the ongoing talks between PA and Israeli authorities as “regrettable”, Sheikh Abu Kuwaik said that the PA preserves Israeli security and stability by prosecuting the resistance elements in West Bank, while the occupation continues its crimes and Judaization schemes. He said that the Israeli officials and leaders do not recognize any of the Palestinian rights to establish a Palestinian state or the right of return, noting that the PA accepted to be part of the Israeli-US project that targets the region. He called on the PA to halt negotiations with the occupation after failing in achieving Palestinian rights along twenty years of negotiation and to concentrate on achieving national reconciliation. Sheikh Hussein Abu Kuwaik said that Hamas movement had participated in the election under its own conditions without compromising any of the national constants or resistance option. The elections resulted in a legitimate elected government that managed to protect resistance and defend Palestinian people in two wars. He pointed to the severe torture practiced against Hamas supporters and elements in PA jails as well as to the continued suppression to the protests and sit-ins organized by the movement in the West Bank as part of the security coordination between the PA and Israeli forces. Regarding the possibility of launching the Egyptian army an aggression on Gaza, he said that the Palestinian resistance has only one enemy, which is the Israeli occupation, and does not wish to start conflicts with anyone else, especially the Egyptian people.

A few days ago, I asked a Palestinian lawyer from my hometown, Dura, if it was possible for me to file a suit case against "The State of Israel" in a Palestinian court. On 25 February, 1953, Israeli troops murdered virtually my entire family, including my three paternal uncles as well as three other relatives. In addition to the cold-blooded murder, the Israeli army then seized our entire property upon which our life depended to a large extent, including 250-300 sheep, condemning my family to live in a state of abject property for more than thirty years. No apology or mea Culpa or acknowledgment of guilt or responsibility has ever been made by the State of Israel.

The Lawyer, Muhammed Rabai' stared at me, saying: "Mr. Amayreh, it seems your knowledge in matters of law is modest. The Oslo Accords gave Israel all the assets and gave us all the liabilities."

He went on: “You have to make a clear distinction between law and justice. Even if Israeli soldiers or terrorists or settlers murdered your entire family, you still wouldn’t have the right to sue Israel in a Palestinian court."

As a defensive reflex, I asked the esteemed lawyer why was it that any Israeli Jew or non-Israeli Jew could sue any Palestinian or Arab entity in an Israeli court without any problem.

"Where is the principle of parity and equality?," I protested.

Eventually, Rabai', gave me a lecture on the legalistic dimensions of the Oslo Accords.

Then he said, with frustration detected in the tone of his speech: "The strong is shameless."

This story is one of thousands of other similar or graver stories encapsulating the utter injustice and inequity inflicted on the Palestinian people and their just national cause as a result of the scandalous accords known as the Oslo Agreement.

I remember that a few days after the conclusion of the infamous agreement, I wrote an Arabic article, describing the agreement as "a body with numerous deformities and defects, however you look at it, you will be offended and affronted."

I also remember I asked the late Faisal Husseini how the PLO was gullible enough to accept such a scandalously oblique deal?

Husseini knew the agreement was thoroughly deformed from its head to its tail. He probably knew more than I did about the scandalous aspects of the Accords which the Palestinian leadership and also Israel wanted to keep secret. But his mouth was muzzled for political reasons and he couldn't say all he knew about the agreement and the circumstances leading up to its acceptance by the PLO leadership.

Eventually, Husseini said this: True, the baby is deformed …but it is our child."

I also asked a number of PLO leaders who were visiting al-Khalil a few months after the Oslo accords were reached why the PLO leadership recognized Israel without receiving a reciprocal Israeli recognition or without even having Israel saying where its borders lie.

To my chagrin, I only received the following laconic answer to all my questions: "Yes I agree with you… that was a mistake that we unfortunately made."

Twenty long years have now passed since the conclusion of the hapless agreement. And there is an absolute consensus among Palestinians, regardless of their political orientation, that the agreement was a disaster for the Palestinian people and their national cause.

The PLO and its mostly mendacious media outlets and other mouth-pieces sought to give the impression that the agreement would lead to the establishment of a viable and territorially contiguous state on the West Bank and Gaza Strip, with Jerusalem as its capital.

The mantra was invoked by the late Palestinian leader Yasser Arafat rather ad nauseam that many Palestinians began to ridicule Arafat for his rhetorical overindulgence and for his utter unrealism.

Arafat didn't always make a meticulous distinction between reality and fantasy. On several occasions, he declared Palestinian towns he visited in the 1990s "liberated, liberated, liberated" even though Israeli occupation soldiers were manning roadblocks and checkpoints a few blocks away from where Arafat was speaking.

Vague agreement

There is no doubt that the Oslo Accords were a vague agreement par excellence. The PLO viewed the accords as an initial stage toward ending the Israeli occupation and achieving independence and statehood.

The Israelis, for their part, viewed the agreement as an arrangement that would allow Israel to maintain control of the West Bank without paying a costly political and economic price.

But in this case, it is only the strong party that enforces its interpretation of the vague agreement. Needless to say, this is exactly what Israel did and has been doing.

Indeed, Israel has maintained effective control over every nook and cranny in the West Bank. It retained a carte blanche to arrest any Palestinian, from an ordinary individual to the highest ranking elected political official. This happened while much of the world kept thinking that the Palestinians were finally free of Israeli occupation and domination.

The current Palestinian leadership, though less captivated by the empty rhetoric that generally characterized Arafat's discourse, is yet to free itself completely from the historical Palestinian leader's legacy and style of thinking.

For example, the "Palestinian Authority" (PA) sees nothing embarrassing or objectionable in referring to itself as "the state of Palestine" when the PA entity is lacking almost everything that would make a state look like a state, including recognized borders, freedom from foreign occupation, sovereignty, and free, unfettered economy.

As to the PA itself, it is no more than a pathetic police state without a state, an entity that keeps itself afloat thanks to handouts and politically-motivated "aid" from the United States, Israel's guardian ally, and the European Union.

In fact, the crippling financial crisis that initially made the PLO accept the scandalous Oslo Accords in 1993 is now forcing the present Palestinian leadership to sit down in futile talks with Israel despite the aggressive continuation of Jewish settlement activities all over the West Bank, especially in East Jerusalem.

A few months ago, Ahmed Qurei', who negotiated the Oslo Agreement on behalf of the PLO, was quoted as saying that 20 years of peace negotiations with Israel yielded a very fat Zero.

In light, one is prompted to ask if the PLO-PA leadership has learned any lessons from the Oslo fiasco and whether it would repeat the 20-year experiment!

Secretary General of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine Ahmed Saadat said the PA headed by Abbas is not ready to draw lessons from the experience of Oslo, as it decided to return to negotiations and to submit to U.S. pressure. Saadat pointed out in a letter leaked from inside his prison cell at the Israeli Shatta jail "there is no logical justification or a project allowing the Oslo team to continue to bet on the negotiations. The experience over more than two decades has proven its failure."

He said that the path of negotiations is based on conditions that apply only on the Palestinian side, while the occupation is free to complete its settlement projects.

Saadat demanded tabling the Palestinian question with the United Nations, in order to provide international protection for the Palestinian people and to put the occupied territory under UN auspices for a transitional period during which the Palestinians would enjoy their right to self-determination and build the institutions of their independent state, which means disengagement from the Agreements of Madrid and Oslo and the futile approach of negotiations.

He said that holding an international conference to compel the occupation to respect international law has become a priority and one of the axes of the alternative political vision for managing the conflict.

Palestinian lawmaker Nayef Rajoub said that the resumption of the peace talks with the Israeli occupation regime under the exceptional circumstances in the Arab region in general and Palestine in particular reflects the indifference of the Palestinian Authority (PA) to what will happen to the Palestinian cause. In a press statement to the Palestinian information center (PIC), Rajoub said that the PA negotiator did not learn from the Oslo experience, which failed miserably.

"20 years after Oslo, the state was not established, the prisoners did not get out of jails, the settlement expansion did not stop, the enemy did not withdraw from one inch of land and there is no land at all to establish a country on," he added.

The lawmaker emphasized that the future of the peace talks with the current Israeli government would never be better than the past 20 years of negotiation with its predecessors.

For his part, senior Hamas official Jamal Al-Tawil said that the PA negotiator's insistence on clinging to his frivolous talks with the occupation after 20 years of ongoing failure is a reprehensible and disgusting behavior.

Tawil told the PIC that it is shameful for the PA negotiator to persist in pointless negotiations and make further concessions while the Israeli occupation keeps achieving all its settlement and Judaization schemes in Palestine.

The Hamas official urged the Palestinian people to uphold their rights and national constants and never waive them, and to keep up their struggle for their national cause.

Member of the political bureau of Hamas Dr. Mousa Abu Marzouk said there are several reasons for the attack on Hamas and the Palestinians in Syria and Egypt. Abu Marzouk noted in a statement on Saturday that the hostility of the Israeli entity and America against Hamas is very obvious and many incitements published by newspapers against Hamas were the result of such enmity. He denied that his movement had moved away from the axis of resistance, and stressed that Hamas is basically a resistance movement. The member of Hamas politburo pointed out that another reason for the attack on Hamas is the Palestinian internal division, and the existence of two different projects; one of them supports the negotiations with Israel while the other is based on resistance. He denied that Hamas had ever intervened in the internal affairs of other states, and said: "This is pure fabrication ... until now this has not been proven." He said that Hamas is a part of the Islamic trend that is progressing with the Arab Spring, and stressed that the priority of Hamas is resisting its enemy, liberating the land, and achieving the right of return for its people. Regarding the Oslo Agreement, Abu Marzouk said this accord brought recognition of the Israeli entity and its legitimacy, adding that it divided the Palestinian land into two parts 78% of the land for Israel, and the other 22% will be determined by the negotiations! He added that the agreement also divided Palestine between the West Bank, Gaza Strip, Jerusalem and the 1948 territories, and ended the national project that was based on ending the occupation, liberating historical Palestine and achieving the return of refugees. The Hamas official said that the Oslo Accord ended the Palestinian Intifada (uprising), and created division in the Palestinian arena.

On the 20th anniversary of the Oslo peace accords, Oxfam International said life for millions of Palestinians is worse now than it was 20 years ago, as the government of Israel has expanded its settlements in the occupied territory and increased its control over Palestinian land and lives. Oxfam, an international aid agency, said in a press release, "Since 1993, Israel has doubled the number of settlers from 260,000 to over 520,000 and expanded the area controlled by settlements to over 42 percent of Palestinian land. A system of checkpoints and other restrictions on Palestinian movement and trade has divided families and decimated the economy". The agency warned a similar pattern is already emerging during the current peace talks. In the past six weeks, Israel has approved the construction of at least 3,600 more settlement homes in the West Bank and East Jerusalem and demolished at least 36 Palestinian homes. In the past 20 years, Israel has demolished 15,000 Palestinian buildings, including homes, water systems and agricultural facilities. "The hope that the Oslo process brought has come crashing down with two decades of obstruction and broken promises. While parties are negotiating peace, actions on the ground are making the lives of Palestinian civilians in particular ever more difficult, and jeopardizing the chance of reaching a solution. A peace process naturally calls for give and take from all parties, but it is Palestinian civilians who have overwhelmingly paid the cost," said Nishant Pandey, head of Oxfam in the Occupied Palestinian Territory and Israel. Actions over past 20 years have impeded the Palestinian economy to a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars a year. The Gaza economy alone has lost around $76 million annually as up to 35 percent of its agricultural land is prevented from being cultivated, and the government of Israel has reduced the waters available to Palestinian fishermen from the 20 nautical miles agreed at Oslo to just six nautical miles today. Exports from Gaza have dropped by 97 percent since the economic blockade was put in place in 2007.

Director of Ahrar Center for prisoners' studies and human rights Fouad Khuffash said the number of those released within the negotiations deals between Ramallah authority and occupation increased to 8,451 prisoners, after the return to negotiations deal in 12 August, 2013. Khuffash issued a documentary study saying that during the 20 years of negotiations 8,425 prisoners were released; along with 26 other prisoners freed in the latest batch after the resumption of the negotiations. The study reviewed the agreements signed in Oslo and their effects and compared them with the Palestinian and Arab swap deals. It stressed that all the agreements have not met the minimum of the aspirations of the Palestinians, including the prisoners and their families, as all veteran prisoners were supposed to be released. Khuffash said: "Any impartial observer or any observer of prisoners’ affairs can note how Israel violates the conventions, and how it has been deliberately fragmenting the issue of the prisoners." The study reported that since 1985 and after the famous exchange deal of Ahmed Jibril there was no agreement or real deal for the release of prisoners, except for Wafa al-Ahrar deal on 18 October 2011.

Thousands of demonstrators took part in mass rallies launched on Friday night from the central governorate in Gaza, in condemnation of the negotiations between the Palestinian Authority and Israel, and in support of Al-Aqsa Mosque. MPs and Hamas leaders headed the marches, in addition to a number of Scouts.

The marchers chanted national slogans supporting the Palestinian resistance, and condemning the bilateral negotiations, which coincide with the 20th anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accord between the PLO and Israel in 1993.

MP Dr. Salim Salama stressed the Palestinian people's rejection of the Accord due to its negative repercussions on the Palestinian cause and the Palestinians in the Diaspora.

"We will remain steadfast and the conspiracies against the Palestinian cause and land will not deter us from adhering to our rights and constants", the MP said, pointing out that the Palestinian people will never accept the negotiations "which give up our ancestors' rights and recognize the Israeli entity."

The Hamas leader stressed that the Palestinian people and Hamas are still committed to the option of resistance in all its forms, especially the armed resistance, considering it the only way to liberate the land, the Islamic holy sites and the Aqsa Mosque which is always exposed to plots.

The Hamas Movement said that de facto president Mahmoud Abbas has no legal and political authority to sign a final peace agreement with the Israeli occupation state. Its spokesman Sami Abu Zuhri told Quds Press on Friday that the attempts made by Abbas, Israel and some Arab countries to use the Arab preoccupation with internal events in order to produce a final peace agreement undermining the Palestinian cause would not succeed.

"Mahmoud Abbas legally exceeded his term of office and now he is working within a national consensus, so any violation of this consensus means that Abbas has lost his legitimacy," spokesman Abu Zuhri underlined.

"Therefore, Abbas has no right to individually engage in such negotiations, not to mention that he is not entitled to sign an agreement with the occupation," the spokesman added.

"The national rights and constants cannot be waived by any Palestinian party or official even if a referendum is held on that because it will be a vote on rights and constants," he stressed.

He also emphasized that Hamas and the other Palestinian resistance factions would not allow Abbas and his negotiators to sign any agreement liquidating the Palestinian rights and constants.

"There is a Palestinian national consensus on the failure of the Oslo accord and that it has brought a disaster for the Palestinian people. Some people like Qurei, who still believe in Oslo, are isolated from the Palestinian people and do not express the true Palestinian position," he stated.

This came in response to Ahmed Qurei, senior executive member of the Palestine liberation organization (PLO), who stated that Abbas is authorized to negotiate with the Israeli side and sign a final peace agreement with it without the consent of the Palestinian people.

He added that Abbas can make any fateful decrees or agreements with Israel even if his decisions were disapproved by most of the Palestinian people.

Qurei made his remarks in an interview conducted on Friday by a Hebrew radio on the 20th anniversary of the Oslo agreement which was signed on September 13, 1993.

On the 20th anniversary of Oslo Accords, Palestinian factions called for halting negotiations with the Israeli occupation and for restoring resistance option as the sole option for the Palestinian people. Hamas movement stated that what is built on wrong is wrong in itself in reference to Oslo Accords, stressing that the Palestinian people did and will not abide by the negotiations' results and will never surrender one any inch of Palestine.

Hamas called on Fatah movement to stop negotiations that aim to liquidate the Palestinian cause, and called on the Palestinian people in the Diaspora to adhere to their right of return.

The Islamic movement confirmed that Jerusalem, with its eastern and western parts and its Islamic and Christian holy sites, is a Palestinian Arab city, stressing its adherence to the Palestinian national constants.

Al-Ahrar Movement stated that negotiations had resulted in creating a Palestinian authority that managed to eradicate armed resistance and create a state of division amid the Palestinian people.

The movement said that resistance is the alternative to negotiations to restore the Palestinian legitimate rights and the Palestinian people’s unity. It also called on the Islamic and Arab Nation to bear its responsibility towards the Palestinian people.

For his part, Mohammed al-Hindi, political bureau member of Islamic Jihad movement, called on PA to stop negotiations with the occupation saying that it provides a green light to the Judaization projects.

Talks' resumption came in parallel with the daily and ongoing Judaization projects in occupied Jerusalem, he said.

After twenty years of negotiations, Arab population has dwindled to only 13% of East Jerusalem while it was 100% before Oslo Accords, he stated.

He called on the Palestinian factions to unite their efforts in support of Jerusalem, warning the occupation of implementing its schemes to demolish al-Aqsa mosque.

In its turn, the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine called on PA to withdraw immediately from the ongoing “suspicious” negotiations, stressing the need to implement the national reconciliation and to end the internal division.

Ministry of Culture said “the survival of Oslo agreement is a major threat to the Palestinian people and their cause,” The ministry stressed Friday in a statement on the 20th anniversary of signing Oslo agreement on the right of return, which is guaranteed by all international laws and conventions,” It called for standing against Israeli settlement, which “eats up Palestinian land under the umbrella of Oslo,” The ministry also called for a stand in the face of Judaizing occupied Jerusalem and obliterating its Islamic and Christian landmarks, warning of passing such plans through so-called peace talks. It stressed the need to resist this agreement intellectually and culturally with the efforts of Palestinian intellectuals and writers. Thanks to this agreement, negotiations are still grinding the Palestinians and devour the land; its statesmen and engineers of the Palestinian Authority (PA) and Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) are still roaming the political space of Palestine in vain. The statement advocated the necessity of “getting rid of the consequences of ‘the notorious Oslo Agreement’ and, driving its signatories and defenders out of our political life, and ridding the Palestinian people and cause from the clutches of this deadly cancer,” Oslo was the first face-to-face agreement between the Israeli occupation and the PLO under which the PLO granted (Israel) 78% of historic Palestine. Palestinian prominant intellectual Edward Said said shortly after the agreement that “the Oslo Accord was basically ‘an instrument of Palestinian surrender’ and ‘the second victory in the history of Zionism’ following the establishment of Israel in 1948 on the Palestinian territory,” According to Said, the PLO’s recognition of Israel by virtue of the Oslo Agreement granted Israeli control over the territories it occupied during the 1967 war, and further allowed Israel the right to negotiate on the remainder of the territories that it annexed by power during the Six-Day War.

13th September, 2013 marks the two-decade anniversary of the signing of the Oslo Accords. In light of this occasion, the Emergency Water and Sanitation/Hygiene (EWASH) Advocacy Task Force wrote a report detailing the situation of Palestinians' water rights in the West Bank and Gaza Strip which argues that "Palestinians have come no closer to achieving their basic water rights" since the Accords were signed.

The report includes a list of quick and telling facts about water allocation in the occupied West Bank and Gaza Strip, and the differences between the water situation before Oslo and today. According to the report, Palestinians living in the West Bank have "less access to water per capita than in 1993," which has resulted in the increasing necessity for Palestinians to purchase water from Israeli companies to "meet their basic water needs."

In the Gaza Strip, which has been under an air, naval and land blockade since 2006 imposed by the Israeli regime, the only source of water for Palestinians is from a Coastal aquifer. The report continued, saying that less than 5% of the water from the Coastal aquifer is actually safe to drink.

Israelis consume some 90% of the shared water resources in the occupied Palestinian territories, which constitutes a violation of international law, the average domestic consumption rate for Palestinians living in the West Bank is 70 liters per capita per day (l/c/d), which is 30 l/c/d lower than the "absolute minimum" World Health Organization recommendation for water consumption. The average Israeli consumption is some three times the WHO minimum, according to the EWASH report.

Israeli's occupation of the West Bank has consistently included the destruction of Palestinian water and sanitation infrastructure, including wells, cisterns, rainwater catchments and sewage treatment plants, which, the report says, is a "primary cause of Palestinian displacement, particularly in Area C." Area C is under full Israeli administrative and military control and constitutes some 60% of the West Bank, according to a recent report by Israeli human rights information center B'Tselem.

EWASH concluded its report with the statement, "Access to safe, reliable and adequate water supplies is a basic right, and should not be held hostage to negotiations or a final agreement. It is time to think outside of the Oslo framework. It is time to act on water."

PLO Negotiations Affairs Department issued on Thursday, a new fact sheet entitled "Twenty Years of Oslo". The sheet also includes a speech by PLO's chief negotiator, Saeb Erekat.

'Twenty Years have passed since the celebrated Arafat-Rabin handshake on the White House lawn. Twenty years have passed since the establishment of the Palestinian National Authority.

Twenty years have passed since the formal start of the peace process. This year marks twenty years of shattered hopes and unfulfilled obligations, of promises betrayed and an illegal colonization process that not only continues to intensify, but has inched us ever closer towards permanently ending any hope for a peacefully negotiated two-state solution.

On September 13th, 1993 the Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements between Israel and the PLO ("Oslo I") was signed. However, Israeli bulldozers kept bulldozing, and with every illegally placed stone, the hope for peace faded. Since 1993, Israeli settlers have tripled in number, their settlements choking and separating East Jerusalem from the rest of the West Bank and fragmenting the West Bank itself into loosely connected cantons. This publication spells out how the Oslo Process metamorphosed into a process of colonization, taking us ever further from a just and lasting solution to this conflict.'

To maintain the security of these settlements and to feed their large appetite for Palestinian land, Israel built an intricate system of control and subjugation: hundreds of checkpoints were placed and dotted across the West Bank, segregated bypass roads were constructed for settler use only, separate legal systems for settlers and Palestinians were maintained, and an annexation wall was built, eating-up a further 9% of West Bank. This publication spells out how the Oslo process metamorphosed into a process of colonization, taking us ever further from a just and lasting solution to this conflict.

Israeli Occupation Forces arrest Palestinian women during the Women's March on Shuhada Street on March 8, 2013. Shuhada Street is a main thoroughfare through Hebron's Old City. Palestinians are prohibited from walking on it or crossing it. The march was part of the Open Shuhada Street campaign.

Friday marks 20 years since Israeli Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin and PLO Chairman Yasser Arafat signed the Oslo Peace Accords on the White House lawn, thereby cementing an agreement that guaranteed perpetual degradation of nearly all aspects of Palestinian life. Oslo entrenched the occupation and absolved Israel from its economic ramifications, which has enabled it to invest in and expand Jewish settlements on Palestinian land exponentially. In addition, Oslo created the Palestinian National Authority, a virtual puppet government that, among other things, has established a state security apparatus that acts as a proxy for Israeli police and military forces. No longer can Palestinians move freely in their own land. Nor can they find meaningful and self-sustaining jobs. They are incarcerated, hounded, harassed and threatened at every turn by the IOF, the PA and militant Jewish settlers. The accords which, when signed in 1993, were to have created a Palestinian state within five years, have deceived and betrayed the Palestinian people. They contained a timeline that laid the path to peace, release of prisoners, Israeli withdrawal from Palestinians lands and self-determination for the Palestinians. Within two months, on Nov. 25, 1993, Rabin had reneged on the first deadline to withdraw troops from Gaza and the Jericho region, saying “the date was not sacred,” according to former Time Jerusalem Bureau Chief Donald Neff. Since then Israel has broken every deadline and reneged on most elements in the accords with impunity and with support from the United States. But instead of stopping settlement construction, the number of settlers living illegally in the West Bank has at least tripled since 1993. Instead of releasing political prisoners, tens of thousands of Palestinian men, women and children have been incarcerated in Israeli prisons illegally. Instead of statehood, Palestinians have lost their freedom of movement and are isolated into Bantustans by the Apartheid Wall, checkpoints, bypass roads and buffer zones. Instead of unification, the Palestinian people are fragmented in the Diaspora, Gaza, the West Bank and within Israel. Secretary of State John Kerry convened a new round of peace talks that promise nothing but the status quo. With the appointment of former AIPAC employee Martin Indyk as special envoy, the US has once again shown we are not an honest broker in the Middle East. Our unconditional diplomatic, political and financial support of Israel has hurt our standing in the Arab and Muslim worlds, has made incredible our claims of moral guidance and also has damaged or own national security. On this, the 20th anniversary of this dark day in Palestinian history, the American Muslims for Palestine unequivocally denounces the Oslo Accords and the suffering they have wrought. We also call upon President Barack Obama, Secretary Kerry and members of Congress to hold Israel accountable for its continued and flagrant violations of international law. The US must immediately withhold aid to Israel until it ends its siege on Gaza, ends the occupation, ceases settlement construction and returns that land to Palestinians and allow Palestinian refugees the right of return. After 20 years, negotiations to nowhere must end and action to rectify decades-long injustice against the Palestinian people must begin.

Hamas said that the Oslo accords and other agreements with the occupation are void, because the Palestinian people will never accept to give up any part of Palestine and its holy sites and their legitimate rights. The movement said in a statement on Thursday on the twentieth anniversary of the Oslo Accords: "The Zionist enemy succeeded through this agreement to make the PLO explicitly recognize its full right to seize 78% of the historical land of Palestine. "

The Israeli occupation used twenty years of negotiations to change the demographic and geographical features in the West Bank and Jerusalem by building the settlements and the wall, the movement added.

It pointed out in its statement that the moves taking place recently would lead to a political disaster, as the Palestinian Authority, with the help of the Israelis, the Americans and some Arab regimes is working on silencing the voice of the people, tightening the blockade on Gaza, and discrediting the resistance.

Hamas condemned the return to the negotiations and the security coordination with the occupation, that aim to liquidate the Palestinian cause, and called on Fatah to end the negotiations and normalization with the occupation.

It also called on the national factions and the Palestinian social forces to form a national coalition to confront the catastrophic results of the negotiations and to establish a comprehensive national vision based on adherence to the people rights and constants, liberating the land, and achieving the right of return.

The movement demanded the Palestinian people at home and in Diaspora to reject the resettlement project and to unite their ranks in order to achieve their right of return.

It stressed in its statement that Jerusalem will always remain a Palestinian Arab city, warning the occupation of the consequences of its persistent criminal procedures against Jerusalem, the holy sites and the Jerusalemites.

Hamas also demanded the lifting of the unjust siege imposed on the Gaza Strip.